Gingrich Wins in South Carolina

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Newt Gingrich won a resounding, come-from-behind victory Saturday in South Carolina's Republican primary, beating Mitt Romney by more than 12 percentage points and opening the way for a potentially contentious battle within the GOP between the establishment and insurgent wings of the party.

The sheer scope of the win punctured the air of inevitability that Mr. Romney had tried to build around his candidacy. Exit polls showed that South Carolina's conservative electorate did not embrace Mr. Romney's arguments that he is best suited to revive the economy and to defeat President Barack Obama

Mr. Gingrich's win came just over a week after his back-of-the-pack finish in New Hampshire's primary, raising questions about his viability as a candidate. Now, he has scrambled the Republican nomination race and ended the prospects that the party would consolidate quickly around a nominee.

The win is a significant milestone for Mr. Gingrich, whose candidacy was severely damaged last summer when most of his top aides resigned en masse after they questioned whether he had the focus to be a viable candidate. He carried on with little staff or money afterward—and now has won in the state whose victor has been chosen the GOP nominee in every contest since 1980.

Speaking to a packed room of supporters in Columbia, the state's capital, Mr. Gingrich said his win was a rebuke to the "elites in Washington and New York." He also acknowledged that he was tilting against many of the elites within his own party.

"We want to run, not a Republican campaign, we want to run an American campaign," he said.

Foreshadowing the testy tenor of the race to come, Mr. Romney took aim at Mr. Gingrich after the polls closed, saying that "our party can't be lead to victory by someone who has never run a business and never run a state…That's a mistake for our party, for our nation.''

He also referred to Mr. Gingrich's attacks of Mr. Romney's work with Bain Capital, a private-equity firm. Those who "disparage" economic success "are not going to be fit to be our nominee," he said.

The nomination contest race now heads to Florida, a far larger and more expensive state for the candidates. Mr. Romney's rivals face a challenge in surmounting his superior organizational and financial edge in the Jan. 31 primary there.

With 99% of precincts counted, Mr. Gingrich had 40.4% of the vote to Mr. Romney's 27.9%. Former Sen. Rick Santorum trailed with 17%, followed by Rep. Ron Paul at 13%. Mr. Gingrich carried all but a handful of counties, while Mr. Romney won in Beaufort and Charleston along the coast, and the county that includes Columbia.

The results mean that a different winner has carried each of the first three contests of the GOP nomination process—a circumstance that has never arisen in the modern primary era. Mr. Santorum narrowly defeated Mr. Romney in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, while Mr. Romney won the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 10—a contest where Mr. Gingrich even finished behind Jon Huntsman Jr., who subsequently dropped out of the race.

The vote showed how unusually fluid and unpredictable the 2012 primary fight has become: More than half of all South Carolina voters said they made up their minds in the last few days, according to surveys conducted as voters left their polling places. Nearly nine in 10 said their choice was influenced by televised debates among the candidates.

Just days ago, Mr. Romney appeared poised to sweep the first three races, in what many Republicans began to see as a steady march to the nomination. But a final tally in Iowa on Thursday stripped Mr. Romney of his tentative victory there and shifted it to Mr. Santorum, just as polls in the Palmetto State showed voters swinging behind Mr. Gingrich.

Mr. Gingrich's message appeared to resonate in a state that has the highest unemployment rate of the three that have voted so far. Mr. Gingrich won a plurality of the 88% of voters who characterized their family's economic situation as "holding steady" or "falling behind." Among the 11% who said they were "getting ahead," Mr. Gingrich fought to a draw with Mr. Romney.

Exit polls showed two central arguments of Mr. Romney's candidacy coming under challenge among South Carolina's conservative electorate.

Mr. Romney has cast himself as a successful businessman with the experience suited to lifting the economy. But Mr. Gingrich won a plurality of voters most concerned about the economy.

Potentially just as alarming for the Romney camp, voters in the campaign's first Southern state saw Mr. Gingrich as best suited to defeat President Barack Obama. Mr. Romney has focused most of campaign rhetoric on attacking Mr. Obama, an effort to cast himself as best able to take the GOP argument to him in November. But voters sided with Mr. Gingrich over Mr. Romney on the electability question by nine percentage points.

Mr. Gingrich also won the largest slice of both tea-party voters and evangelical Christians.

One big question as the focus shifts to Florida is the fate of Mr. Santorum, who appears to have failed in South Carolina to persuade conservative voters to make him the main rival to Mr. Romney. Mr. Santorum plans to begin campaigning in Florida on Sunday afternoon and will compete in the campaign's 18th debate Monday night in Tampa.

Mr. Romney enters the Florida phase with some clear advantages. He has a vast team of local organizers across the state, many of whom have focused on getting absentee ballots into the hands of Romney supporters.

As of Saturday, some 185,435 Republican absentee ballots have been returned or cast, according to Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Florida. In 2008, about 1.95 million votes were cast in the GOP primary.

Mr. Romney saw his double-digit lead in opinion surveys in South Carolina evaporate over the past week, as he struggled to win over the state's notoriously conservative voters and to answer questions about whether he would release his tax forms, in the face of persistent questions from his GOP rivals.

The South Carolina stand had an opposite effect on Mr. Gingrich, who limped into the state after a pair of lackluster finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, only to catapult himself back into contention with a pair of overpowering debate performances in which he scored points with conservatives, in part by lashing out at the moderators.

Saturday's result makes it easier for Mr. Gingrich to pitch himself as the conservative alternative to Mr. Romney—not Mr. Santorum.

The former Pennsylvania senator has now failed in two successive contests to build off of his unexpected Iowa surge—and after he won the backing of dozens of influential evangelical leaders. His distant finish in South Carolina is particularly troubling, because he failed to generate enough enthusiasm from the state's influential evangelical voters to narrow the gap with Mr. Gingrich or Mr. Romney.

Mr. Santorum had criticized Mr. Romney as boring and run-of-the-mill, and Mr. Gingrich as erratic and undisciplined. "I couldn't be more excited to see this race move on to Florida," Mr. Santorum said on CNN after congratulating Mr. Gingrich for his victory.

Mr. Santorum predicted that his conservative backing and momentum would prove more "long-lasting" than that of Mr. Gingrich, and he pledged to campaign in several states in the weeks ahead.

"As a result of what happened tonight, this race isn't going to be over this week, or next week," Mr. Santorum said.

A cheerful Mr. Paul told supporters he's still in this race: "We will continue to do this, there's no doubt about it." He pointed out that less than 2% of the delegates have been chosen so far as the crowd erupted into loud cheers of "End the Fed!"

The race became intensely personal in South Carolina. The candidates and their allies ran millions of dollars in negative ads to drag down their opponents, and the candidates' debates included a series of feisty exchanges between the four remaining main contenders.

Mr. Gingrich, in particular, benefited from two heated exchanges with moderators during the South Carolina debates. On Monday, he lashed out at Juan Williams of Fox News for asking him whether he thought he might have offended black people for saying inner-city kids should get janitorial jobs at the schools they attend to imbue them with a strong work ethic. On Thursday, he laid into CNN's John King for opening the debate with a question about his ex-wife's allegations that he had asked her for an open marriage.